Page 76 of Of Literature and Lattes
Agent Barnes gestured between everyone seated. “Ms. Harrison, Ms. Meyers, this is Agent Campbell, Agent Martinez, and Special Agent Pullman.”
The one called “special” was older than the other two. Perhaps denoting seniority? He almost reminded Alyssa of her dad, except his face wasn’t as light. He’s seen things, she thought.
“What’s the difference?” she blurted, looking at the three men in turn. “I mean, aren’t you all ‘special’?”
The questions hung between them, and she felt heat bloom red across her cheeks.
Special Agent Pullman laughed. “As much as we’d all like to believe we’re special, Ms. Harrison, I have the power to make arrests. These two do not.”
“Oh... I see.” She gulped. She should have kept her mouth shut.
Pullman spoke again. “Ms. Harrison, we’ve called you here today to find some answers.”
“Yes. I’m ready.” She glanced to Tracy, who nodded.
“You misunderstand me. We’d like you to do the finding.” He shuffled through a small stack of papers. “We are now at the point of looking into XGC’s data, and a lot of the questions you posed in your final months mirror our own.” He looked up at her. “What do you say to working together?”
“I thought you’d be done with all that. I thought you’d know, that you could tell me. I hoped—”
Tracy cleared her throat.
Alyssa pressed her lips shut.
“We’re still in the early days... The movies always get that part wrong.” He smiled as he slid papers, one by one, across the table. “None of this happens quickly. Cases this complex take years, not weeks or even months.” He tapped one of the pages now set before her. “From where I sit, you knew nothing about what was going down. You ask in this email all the questions we’re asking, and I’ve interviewed enough of your colleagues to understand how the company’s silo structure and secrecy kept you from easy answers. But these?” He tapped different points on several more pages. “These prove to me you never got those answers and, more significantly, you never stopped searching for them.”
He stood and leaned over the table to tap two more sheets of paper to her right. “In this email, you got downright belligerent.” He tapped the last page on the far right. “And this email from Mr. Connelly to HR initiates the process to fire you.”
“I was going to be fired?”
“Consider it a good thing, Ms. Harrison.” Pullman sat again and stretched several more sheets of paper toward her.
She accepted them, and as she read her questions and concerns, the stress and the fear came back to her. It felt like a living thing crawling up her spine to fill her throat. This volley of emails was sent a year before XGC’s doors closed. Tag had taken the company’s trials live and had started notifying customers of looming health concerns. It prompted the company’s firstForbescover and60 Minutesinterview. It was also when, in Alyssa’s mind and according to her math, the hit rates and successes became statistically impossible.
These first exchanges raised questions no one wanted to hear. Everyone was overjoyed. Champagne flowed for four Fridays after that. Security tightened. And Tag, who’d always roamed the halls to “see and be seen,” virtually disappeared. No one had direct access to him any longer.
A comprehensive assessment of the data. That’s what she’d asked for. She didn’t say something had gone terribly wrong. She saved that line for email number two. The first simply posed questions to her boss and asked for the raw data to run comparisons. She took it up a notch in her second email. She presented her previous trial scores and “hit rates” and raised concerns about the live trial’s validity—and she sent that to the entire executive team. In her third email, she saw the graphs she had created and inserted to make her case in another format. No one had listened. Her final email in that first go-round ended with pleas for answers and continued demands for access to the raw data.
Alyssa’s stomach burned and her head filled. Reliving her final year at XGC felt almost as horrid as her first run-through. She had forgotten how terse, then threatening, the replies to her emails had been. She was told she didn’t have adequate clearance, there were security concerns, this wasn’t the time to look back rather than forward. She was told she was counterproductive, damaging, even a risk to the company’s well-being, mission, and culture. Then the replies stopped. Tag himself emerged one afternoon, found her alone in the south stairwell, and as they descended from the sixth floor to the fourth, reminded her, “Squeaky wheels don’t get the grease here. They get replaced.”
She set down the papers and laid her palm on them. “I never got the raw data. I don’t know how I can help you.”
“Now you have it... all of it. We want to reverse engineer everything that happened. We can do it ourselves, but you wrote most of the algorithms. You can save us time and the taxpayers a few dollars. As I said, cases like this take years. Maybe you could cut a couple of those down for us?”
“Why me? Sonia Keutz was our director, and there’s Paul Morris or, better still, Arjun Chowdhury. He’s brilliant.”
“Yet you were the only fly in the ointment.”
Tracy leaned forward. “What are you offering?”
Pullman looked at her, visually dismissed her, and locked eyes on Alyssa. “Nothing. We are offering you nothing, Ms. Harrison, but we are giving you the chance to help clean up this mess.” He leaned back and waited.
“But—” Tracy opened her mouth again.
Alyssa cut her off. “Yes. Anything.”
Tracy twisted toward her. “That is not how this works.”
Alyssa wasn’t listening. She was watching Special Agent Pullman with the complete knowledge that he had her measure. He saw through her to the core fact that, almost more than wanting to walk away and put XGC behind her, she wanted the data. She wanted answers.
